Presenters

Liam Irwin - PhD Student Brent Murray - PhD Student Nicholas Coops - Professor

Integrated Remote Sensing Studio University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

Overview

  • Light Detection and Ranging (lidar)
  • The lidR package - a brief introduction
  • Workshop overview

What is lidar?

  • Light Detection and Ranging
  • Active form of remote sensing
  • Measures distance to target surfaces with millions of narrow light pulses
  • Airborne laser scanning performs lidar systematically from aircraft or drones

Lidar Data – Point Clouds

  • Discrete returns are aggregated into point clouds (.LAS/.LAZ)
  • Lidar points have three-dimensional (XYZ) coordinates, and other attributes (Intensity, ReturnNumber, etc…)
  • Point clouds can be processed into vegetation structure summaries with lidR

lidR

  • Written by Jean-Romain Roussel
  • Package for manipulating and visualizing ALS data
  • Written entirely open source within R-geospatial ecosystem (terra/sf)
  • Most processes run efficiently with back-end C++ code

r-lidar

  • lidR author Jean-Romain Roussel is commited to maintaining the lidR package as fully open source
  • He now does so through a r-lidar as consulting and development company targeted at lidar related applications
  • Visit r-lidar.com or contact info@r-lidar.com for more information

Workshop Outline

  • Introduction to lidar and lidR (09:00)
  • Reading LAS and LAZ files (09:10)
  • Point Classification and filtering (9:15)
  • Digital Terrain Models and Height Normalization (9:25)
  • Canopy Height Models (9:35)
  • lidar Summary Metrics (9:50)
  • File Collection Processing Engine (10:10)

Get Set Up!

https://liamirwin.github.io/LPS_lidRtutorial/